Gentrification and wages have absolutely murdered third spaces, so young people make up for it by going for higher education since everyone's doing that anyway – it's the social norm. For a lot of young adults college is not just a phase of life you're expected to go through, but also a venue to socialize and network rather than to learn in some idealistic sense of the word, or for whichever other altruistic goal you may think of.
Of course there's also degree inflation i.e. the fact that having some degree is the new baseline for most jobs, even if owning one doesn't mean you're qualified, even if a college education and the skills you need for a job are often a Venn diagram with no intersection. It's odd how all that can be true and yet our teenagers still willingly go into massive debt for a certification.
>What awaits the future?So long as white collar labor is better paid than blue, and so long as companies still ask for degrees it will stay that way. While a college degree doesn't correlate much with what you'll actually do in the office, basic education is at least aligned with the sort of theoretical or practical knowledge you actually need for that. So there's no incentive to *not* ask for a degree as a bare minimum litmus test. Probably also as a socioeconomic filter because corpos don't want fent junkies in their cubicles.
Some porks like Thiel and other assorted techbros are pushing this idea that academia and university are obsolete for today's enterprise needs, and to be replaced by private training and R&D centers of sorts. (Not too far off from e.g. Samsung's universities in Worst Korea and other corporate-sponsored programs and institutes.) I could see them trying to force this idea onto society through strategic, massive funding and maybe taking advantage of e.g. traditional education's slow adoption of AI technologies beyond just boomer-chatting with GPT or some other assistant. University governance systems and academia politics tend to be dogmatic and conservative –ironically– and thus are slow to adopt revolutionary new tech like LLMs, or modern trends in software development. Some companies already hire autie kids who just git gud at programming for fun without ever setting foot in a school.
From a lefty praxis POV, students should definitely focus more on rethinking higher education itself, and weaponizing knowledge for revolution, rather th
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